Particle.news
Download on the App Store

Fei‑Fei Li Calls Spatial Intelligence AI’s Next Frontier, Previews Early World Model

Her essay urges a shift from text‑first systems to models that perceive and act within 3D environments.

Overview

  • On Nov. 10, Stanford professor and World Labs co‑founder Fei‑Fei Li published a long essay arguing that spatial intelligence is the decisive next step for AI.
  • She says today’s large language and multimodal models handle abstract knowledge yet falter on distance, direction, object rotation, navigation, and sustained video coherence.
  • Li proposes a class of world models defined by three capabilities—generative, multimodal, interactive—to represent, simulate, and update consistent 3D worlds over time.
  • World Labs, founded in early 2024, shared a limited preview of an early system called Marble for selected creators, with broader availability not announced.
  • The roadmap calls for a universal training objective, large multimodal datasets including depth and tactile signals, new 3D/4D‑native architectures, and improved sensing to unlock uses in robotics, creative tools, and scientific discovery.